Ponce de Leon's Discovery Timeline

Editor’s Note: Sam Turner’s series regarding the arrival of Juan Ponce de Leon in the New World and in honor of the 500th anniversary of Ponce de Leon’s arrival continues. Turner is sharing information on a regular basis through the end of March. The final segment will be published March 31.

At Guanahani Island Juan Ponce de Leon and the men of his fleet prepared one of the fleet’s vessels for the crossing of the Windward Gulf and made final preparations on the other vessels to get them ready for sea. As mentioned previously in this column, we do not know how long the fleet remained at Guanahani. There is an approximate ten day window for this departure between March 16th, if they took only one day to ready their vessel, and March 26, the day before sighting an unidentified island.

Unless someone finds the original journals and documents from this voyage, we will never know what day the fleet actually departed for parts northwest.

On Easter Sunday, March 27, 1513, land described as an island in the Herrera account was sighted to the west. This was the first sighting of the Florida coast. This first sighting is where many writers on the subject of the discovery of Florida err in their interpretation of Herrera. This stems from a simplistic approach to the text. Because the land is described as an “island,” many historians assume that it must be one of the numerous Bahamas Islands known to the Spanish as the Lucayan Islands. It was not until some years after 1513 that the Spanish themselves realized that Florida was part of a greater land mass. This 16th century misunderstanding of geography continues to confuse scholars to this day.

As noted previously, the Lucayan Islands had been scoured and largely depopulated by Spanish slavers who had also made a number of incursions into Florida for the same purpose by 1513. It is very unlikely therefore for any of the Lucayan Islands to have been unknown and un-plundered of their inhabitants by Spanish slavers. The unidentified island sighted March 27 was the east coast of Florida.

While many writers on the subject mistakenly believe that the island sighted on Easter Sunday was a Lucayan island, not all are so convinced. Henry Herrisse, writing in the last quarter of the 19th century, also interpreted Herrera to mean the first sighting of the Florida coast occurred on Easter Sunday, March 27. Many Spanish writers on the subject also concur on this point.

We do not know with certainty which island today was the Guanahani Island of Ponce de Leon. This prevents us from being able to draw any definitive conclusions regarding the first landing spot of Ponce de Leon based exclusively on following Herrera’s account of 1513 compass headings. However, such a claim has been made by Douglas Peck whose single 1990 voyage in a modern fiberglass yacht took him to Melbourne Beach. He believes that what is today called San Salvador Island, renamed by the Bahamian government in the 1920s, is the Guanahani Island of Ponce de Leon. While there is a chance that this is indeed the case, it is just as likely that it is not.

The Melbourne Beach theory also rests in large measure on Ponce’s fleet departing Guanahani on April 25 which we have no way of knowing. This is because two days after departing today’s San Salvador Island in 1990, Peck found himself alongside Eleuthera Island. This, Peck claims, had to be the unidentified island sighted on March 27. However, as we have seen, this unidentified island was in fact the east coast of Florida discovered Easter Sunday.

For the numerous reasons sown, the Melbourne Beach theory is a very long shot indeed.